this post was submitted on 24 Mar 2025
1519 points (98.9% liked)
Technology
73698 readers
3242 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
As much as I hate to be that guy, it's worth keeping in mind that BlueSky is not really practising what they preach here. The AT protocol formally allows for a kind of decentralization, but it is prohibitively expensive to run an instance, meaning that only rich folks or those who are willing to accept money from venture capitalists will be capable of actually doing so.
ActivityPub already existed when they started BlueSky. They chose to not make their protocol compatible. The reason is simple: They are a company, and they have a profit motive. ActivityPub is too democratic, and therefore hard to monetize. By now they have a bunch of crypto bro investors who want their money back. It's better to leave your money elsewhere.
I obviously support ActivityPub or I wouldn’t be posting this here but one of the AtProtocol developers bought a Raspberry Pi with 8GB ram and added an NVME drive. He’s trying to prove (or possibly make) this point wrong. https://bsky.app/profile/why.bsky.team
So far, it seems like it’s “working” but he’s found some things that are way too slow and needs to be fixed for it to run on a Raspberry Pi. But that gives me some confidence that the developers, at least, aren’t trying to make it so only people with deep pockets can run an instance. (I don’t know what the investors want but the developers aren’t scheming assholes.)
It’s probably going to ultimately be a situation where anyone with a high end PC (by today’s standards) can run their own instance. It’s definitely not an A.I. situation where you have to reopen Three Mile Island and piss away more water than Nestle to self-host.
Yeah nope. At least not so far and i dont see why it would change. The current situation is that you can host stuff yourself, but you wont be able to connect and federate with any other servers or users without bluesky's permission. Its not a level playing field and it never will be.
Lemmy (and similarly any other federated system) is only NOT enshittified because people successfully grew lots of competing servers and therefore prevented a monopoly power. If lemmy.world hosted 90% of lemmy users, i guarantee that it would have quickly turned to shit.
Even if bluesky was using proper federation and people started setting up other AT Protocol instances, bluesky would still hold 99.9999% of all users. They have literally zero reason to change this situation and changing it would cost them millions in advertisement for other completely independent instances.
It is waaay too late for bluesky to change in any meaningful way.
Their federation doesn't work the same as Lemmy & Mastodon there's no federation to individual servers.
If Bluesky introduced ads to their app, you can take all Bluesky data from the relay and host your own app without ads. This is working today and easy to do.
If they started charging for access to the relay you can host your own relay and it will parse all users data for you to use. This is also working today but it's a little expensive.
Something would have to SIGNIFICANTLY change with the protocol for Bluesky to change how the relay interacts with the PDS, that would require such a large infrastructure change there's no reason even questioning further.
The reason you don't see anyone doing it right now is because there's not much incentive to. On Lemmy we're each on our own little "community" but Bluesky is just here's everyones data no matter what when hosting a relay.